Not enough, says John Williams of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. “The estimate of the sustainable diversion limit, which is the amount of water we need to have in the system to maintain a healthy river, doesn’t have any provision for climate change at the moment,” he told Crikey.

Williams served as the NSW Natural Resources Commissioner from 2006-11 and is a former chief of land and water at the CSIRO.

“They haven’t looked at what the river needs to be healthy,” said Williams. “Society may choose to have unhealthy rivers, but we need the science to say how we have a healthy river, and they haven’t provided that.”

Williams’ concerns were backed up by a recent report from the Goyder Institute for Water Research, which criticised the Murray-Darling Basin Authority for not taking sufficient account of the future effects of climate change in its controversial plan.

According to the report: “The possible impacts of climate change and increased groundwater allocations on future water availability are not evaluated in the flow recovery scenarios provided by the MDBA.”

But the MDBA’s chief executive Rhondda Dickson claims that this is not the case, arguing that the plan must be flexible enough to respond to unanticipated changes to climate.

Dickson recently told a climate change conference that “we believe that our adaptive and pragmatic approach is a critical step in adapting to climate change: allowing enough flexibility in the planning process.  Our ability to predict future climate trends is improving all the time, as is our understanding of how climate will affect stream inflows.”

Given the high degree of environmental diversity within the Murray-Darling catchment area — which takes in four states and the ACT across several climate zones — the basin’s climate will continue to be highly variable, Dickson argues. Not only must residents contend with global climate change, but cyclical effects — droughts, floods and everything in between — will continue to cause short and mid-term inconsistencies in weather around the catchment.

The MDBA’s general manager of water planning Tony McLeod agrees with his colleague, citing Australia’s experience with an already variable climate as giving the MDBA an advantage in anticipating future climate changes. “We’re setting out a framework that deals with extreme wets and extreme drys,” he told Crikey. “We’ve got a lot of lived experience with those extremes. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn more and do more, and we’re certainly doing this. But extremes aren’t a new thing.”

The plan will be reviewed at least every ten years, and there is the capacity for reviews as frequently as every five. The first is to take place in 2015, before the plan’s proposed enforcement date in 2019.

But Williams thinks the MDBA shouldn’t wait until 2015 to decide what its targets will be. “I think that the science is more than sufficient to build that into where the sustainable diversion limit is, and they haven’t provided the science to establish this SDL. It puts awful uncertainty onto the community,” he told Crikey.

Williams thinks that the MDBA’s well-publicised backing-down from its scientifically-based proposed sustainable diversion limit of 3,000 to 4,000 gigalitres was a political move. “They’ve decided to base the recommendation on a political judgement rather than what the science, so they can instead through what society wants to do. They’ve mixed up politics and science, and that’s a murky thing to do.”

The most important thing Australia needs to do, according to McLeod, is decide what environmental objectives the MDBA should aim for.

Last Friday the MDBA announced the creation of a new Advisory Committee on Social, Economic and Environmental Sciences, which will examine both science and socio-economic knowledge to help the basin plan adapt in coming years.

“We are keen to establish this independent advisory committee to help us focus our future science and knowledge priorities over the next few years,” said MDBA head Craig Knowles in a press release. “We are looking for the best and brightest minds in the fields of hydrology, ecology, social sciences and economics.”

The press release goes on to note that the science behind the basin plan is not up for questioning in this committee, stating “The recommendations of the CSIRO-led review of the science behind the draft plan will be part of the work of the Advisory Committee. The CSIRO review found that draft Basin Plan represented a sufficient basis to begin an adaptive process of managing the Basin.”

Speaking about the Authority’s planned new advisory committee , McLeod tells Crikey that it will “get us to have a conversation about what these environmental objectives are that we seek to achieve, and what we value.”

Expect the conversation to get even more heated.

So how would Joe Bast help them to gain that richly deserved attention?

How about sticking a picture of murderer and terrorist Ted Kaczynski — a.k.a the Unabomber — on a giant billboard next to the words “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?”

According to a Heartland press release, this would be the first in a series of ads which would feature Osama Bin Laden, Fidel Castro and Charles Manson, who Heartland says all “believe” in global warming.

As Joe Bast said in the company’s statement:

“Heartland’s first digital billboard…  is the latest effort by the free-market think tank to inform the public about what it views as the collapsing scientific, political, and public support for the theory of man-made global warming. It is also reminding viewers of the questionable ethics of global warming’s most prominent proponents.”

There’s not much point in spelling out why this campaign is mind-numbingly dumb and stupefyingly offensive, but then let’s be pointless for a moment. I wonder if the unabomber, or Castro or bin Laden accept evolution too and if I should then feel dirty and grubby for having that in common with them. On the picture used for the billboard, Kaczynski can clearly be seen wearing clothes. I wear clothes too. Am I turning into some sort of nutcase?

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman called the campaign “possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns”.

Bast, with his hypocrisy-booster now turned up well past eleven, justified the posters by saying: “We found it interesting that the ad seemed to evoke reactions more passionate than when leading alarmists compare climate realists to Nazis or declare they are imposing on our children a mass death sentence.”

Perhaps climate science denier Christopher Monckton should give Bast a call to set him straight, given he has cornered the market in Nazi name-calling.

Heartland has now pulled the digital billboard after a stream of protests from those which it would consider to be on their side, although Joe Bast said he would not apologise. Climate sceptic Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the conference speakers, threatened to pull out if the ads were not removed. Another speaker, climate sceptic Ross McKitrick, called the ads “fallacious, juvenile and inflammatory” and believed the campaign “sullies the reputation of the speakers you had recruited”.

Heartland last made headlines when a small cache of documents, deceptively acquired from its headquarters by scientist Peter Gleick, revealed the institute was planning to devise a new curriculum to teach climate denial in schools. The documents also revealed it was paying some academics thousands, including James Cook University’s Bob Carter, who is a speaker at the Chicago conference at the end of the month. Professor Carter is an advisor to a string of climate science misinforming organisations, including the Institute of Public Affairs, a sponsor of previous Heartland conferences.

Carter isn’t the only Australian connection to the conference. Among its “silver sponsors” are the Australian Libertarian Society and the Carbon Sense Coalition.

The ALS treasurer is Tim Andrews, the executive director of the new Australian Taxpayers Alliance which has stated its first mission to campaign against Australia’s carbon price legislation. Andrews is a veteran of the Koch Associate Program in the US, a project of the oil industry billionaire Koch brothers who have been pouring millions into climate denial campaigns.

The Carbon Sense Coalition is a small-time climate change sceptic organisation founded by coal industry veteran Vivian Forbes, a current director at Brisbane-based Stanmore Coal.

Presumably after this episode, the 19 corporations which — along with the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil — have helped fund some of Heartland’s projects over the years will now be considering whether they’re happy to ever again have their names associated with a think-tank which juxtaposes climate science acceptance with the morals of mass murderers.

After the Heartland leaks earlier this year, GM Motors said it was severing all ties with Heartland. Will the likes of PepsiCo, Pfizer and Time Warner Cable now follow?

*This post first appeared on Graham Readfearn’s blog.

The line currently being spun by climate change sceptic commentators and bloggers is that climate change scientists have lied about getting death threats.

At the same time a campaign of systematic abuse of climate scientists in an attempt to get them to withdraw from public debate is being ignored.

This spin-cycle started yesterday in The Australian, with a story reporting the findings of a report from the Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim.

Pilgrim ordered that 11 documents turned up through a Freedom of Information request to the Australian National University could, against the wishes of the university, be released to the public.

Pilgrim concluded that ten of the 11 documents “contain abuse in the sense that they contain insulting and offensive language” but did not contain “threats to kill or threats of harm”.

Oh. Well that’s OK then?

One email, the commissioner said, described an “exchange” during an “off-campus” event. The commissioner said the exchange “could be regarded as intimidating and at its highest perhaps alluding to a threat”, adding that the “danger to life or physical safety” was “only a possibility, not a real chance”.

In the report, Pilgrim added: “In my view, there is a risk that release of the documents could lead to further insulting or offensive communication being directed at ANU personnel or expressed through social media. However, there is no evidence to suggest disclosure would, or could reasonably be expected to, endanger the life or physical safety of any person.”

Climate sceptic commentators and bloggers have taken this decision to mean that climate scientists have not received death threats and, on the face of it, that might seem like a fair conclusion.

Except they’ve ignored two key facts which undermine their conclusion.

The first, is that the FOI request only asked for correspondence covering a six month period from January to June 2011. What’s more, the request only asked for correspondence regarding six ANU academics. The report from the Privacy Commissioner made this clear.

Secondly, the original investigation which sparked the FOI request, published in The Canberra Times, found more than 30 climate scientists had received threats or abuse of one kind or another at universities across Australia and that this campaign had been going on for years. It wasn’t news to some of us. None of the emails I published on my blog were from scientists at ANU.

Despite the narrow nature of the FOI request and the foul nature of the campaign, sceptic blogger Jo Nova was utterly beside herself claiming the Privacy Commissioner’s report had shown that the campaign of intimidation didn’t exist.

Anthony Watts wrote the claims were entirely “manufactured” with “not a single document” to back it up.

James Delingpole said there had been no death threats “whatsoever” during the campaign, and then went on to trivialise reports that Professor Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia, had considered suicide.

At Catallaxy Files, senior IPA fellow Sinclair Davidson, said the threats “never happened” and were a lie.

All of these reports, no doubt hastily compiled but with a total lack of care or compassion, failed to take into account that the FOI request was so narrow that it couldn’t possibly back up their conclusions.

Sounds to me a little bit like cherry-picking one particular piece of climate data to try and construct an argument, while ignoring all the other evidence around them.

We still don’t even know what the documents in this selective trove actually say because the ANU has not yet released them, saying instead that it is “reviewing the report” and “considering our options”.

The question of whether the abuse constitutes a “death threat” is a red herring.

When climate researchers have their children threatened with sexual abuse, have their cars smeared with excrement and get emails telling them they’re going to “end up collateral damage”, then what else is it but a hate campaign.

In my view, the campaign of abuse is designed to intimidate climate scientists, discourage them from engaging with the public and discourage them from carrying out their research. Failing to condemn it shows just how low the climate change debate has become.

*This post first appeared on Graham Readfearn’s blog.

Half of the money from the CEFC will go to energy efficiency and low emissions measures and the other half will go to renewable energy projects. But success overseas has been varied, with high expectations, company collapses and problems with financial viability.

In the UK — where Prime Minister David Cameron promised to lead the “greenest government ever” — his administration is still in the processing of developing its Green Investment Bank. Its executive director Oliver Griffiths announced this week that the GIB should be fully operational by the end of 2012 — several months later than originally planned — although initial investments were beginning this month.

The £3 billion project will be the world’s first environmental investment bank, and plans to invest £775 million in its first financial year. It won’t have any borrowing power until at least 2015, but there are other programs already up and running, including UK Green Investments which will invest in green infrastructure — £200 million in total — until the GIB receives state aid approval.

Offshore wind has proved a popular renewable investment in the UK, although they cost double as much as onshore turbines and offshore wind companies remain reliant on the £1 billion paid annually in government subsidies.

Plus, a three-year deal between Siemens and the Carbon Trust was recently announced which will see £550 million worth of business loans handed out to help increase energy efficiency measures in businesses, with the reduction in energy bills expected to match loan repayments. The Carbon Trust is a government-funded organisation, although Cameron sliced its funding by 40% last year.

Across the Atlantic, the  US government has been guaranteeing green loans over the last few years rather than fronting up the cash. Not that loans are the most critical part for businesses investing. “The cash is almost a secondary issue, it’s who takes the credit risk on the guarantee,” Dr Stuart Nettleton, a senior lecturer in management and systems and energy policy at UTS, told Crikey.

Yet just this week it was announced that First Solar – a US solar panel manufacturer — will close a German plant and lay off 2000 workers internationally, partly due to a reduction in solar subsidies in Germany. It will now be forced to write down US$150 million in assets and return US$30 million in government funding. First Solar has previously received a US$1.46 billion loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy.

“We have to carefully distinguish between energy projects and production of devices such as solar panels,” Nettleton told Crikey. He noted Germany — whose KfW bank will commit 100 billion euros for green loans over the next five years — is phasing out its solar power subsidies due to high costs and inefficient returns.

First Solar is not the only high-profile government-backed renewable company with problems, reports Sunil Sharhan in Fortune:

“Solyndra, the solar company that received US$535 million and shuttered last summer; battery company Ener1, which after receiving US$118 million declared bankruptcy this year; and auto company Fisker, which was awarded US$529 million from a US$25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program created in 2007, received US$193 million in 2010, but is struggling now to draw down the remaining US$336 million from the Department of Energy. Reportedly over US$16 billion of federal green loans have been given to companies either run or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.”

What CEFC investments are likely to succeed in Australia? “Perhaps the only renewable energy technology approaching cost-effectiveness is indeed fourth-generation nuclear,” said Nettleton. “Nuclear at the moment is illegal in Australia, but I suspect that will change over time because the answer in the future is a mixture of nuclear and solar and geothermal if that’s possible.”

Solar technology will also struggle to viability. “[It] depends how much the government is prepared to suffer financial hurt as to how much it will go with solar,” Nettleton said. “For a solar project to proceed at the moment would actually be very unlikely in terms of feedback of financial returns and risks that I’ve seen in the market.”

Don’t discount solar energy projects yet though. “It does have a future role, but it doesn’t yet fulfil the potential that people had hoped it would in terms of driving viable projects,” he added.

And another issue: the Greens demanded carbon capture and storage technology be banned from the CEFC. “There is no solution at the moment without the success of carbon capture and storage or without the acceptance of nuclear power or without the fortuitous ability to use geothermal,” said Nettleton.

Three weeks ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report that shows the connections between climate change and extreme weather events. Climate change, as we know, is largely the result of greenhouse gas emissions that come from all communities, everywhere in the world. The impact caused by these emissions will also be felt around the world.

According to the report, the effects of climate change can already be felt through extreme weather events like heat waves, which have significantly increased over the past 60 years. Other extremes that already affect vulnerable communities, are projected to worsen — flooding, intense rains, rising sea levels, droughts, and stronger tropical storms will strike communities more often and be less predictable. Knowing in advance that these events may lead to disasters, allows donors and agencies to help communities adapt to the changes and be better prepared for current and future impacts before disaster strikes.

Because the truth is, although the impact of climate change will be felt by all, the extremes will hit some harder than others. The irony is that the people and communities least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions will bear the brunt of the impacts. While this is in part due to geography, the overwhelming reason is poverty.

The poor tend to live in more disaster prone areas, where no one else wants to live; they have less resilient infrastructure; and less access to healthy food, clean water, sanitation, education and medical facilities. Their livelihoods are often reliant on natural resources that are susceptible to climate change impacts. Poor families and communities are also less able to “bounce back” after a disaster, which leaves them less able to cope with the next disaster — making them more and more vulnerable each time crisis strikes. This can lead to a vicious cycle: poverty increases vulnerability to climate change, while climate change impacts keep people trapped in poverty.

What does this look like in real life? Outside Vietnam’s capital Hanoi, communities of H’mong people live in grinding poverty in remote villages along the steep hills of Hong Ca. They are entirely reliant on their increasingly fragile ecosystem for their livelihoods. The communities already face flash flooding, landslides, soil erosion and droughts. They are seeing increasing variability in weather patterns, making it harder to predict planting, as seasons are changing from year to year.

A lack of information and understanding about these changes lowers their productivity, which means already poor families have less food to eat and produce to sell, increasing their vulnerability to the kinds of extreme weather events the new climate change report predicts will increase in the coming years.

But the people of Hong Ca are not resigned to their fate. They are fighting back and, with assistance from Save the Children, are increasing their understanding of the impacts climate change will have on their communities.  And they’re doing it by unique and innovative means, in some cases through songs and drama performed by children through village schools, using their native language.

Already, the children’s activities have catalysed action. In order to make sure they have fresh water stored as rainfalls become less predictable, the communities have enhanced the way they catch and store fresh water. They have diversified the crops they grow, including introducing drought tolerant varieties to make sure they can maintain access to food even during the driest periods. With these measures, the community itself is helping its people adapt to climate change, ensuring they are better equipped for potential extreme changes, while keeping the villages largely self-sustaining.

This project is only one of a growing number of initiatives that highlight the benefits of investing not only in climate change adaptation, but on community-based adaptation. This means working directly at local level to address the specific climate change challenges facing a particular community — like the H’mong of Hong Ca. Make no mistake, as the impacts of extreme weather events increase in the coming years, the community of Hong Ca, and people like them worldwide, will need to adapt to a more hostile climate. The difference these programs make is the focus of this week’s global conference, and the reason over 300 people from Australia to Brazil, have gathered in Vietnam.

Late last month VCAT approved HRL’s plan to build a 600MWe project under its subsidiary Dual Gas — in May 2011 the Victorian Environmental Protection Agency had ruled that HRL was only allowed to build a 300MWe power plant — but stated that HRL could only proceed with construction when the federal government has entered contracts for the closure of other power plants under its Contracts for Closure program.

“VCAT in granting approval for a new 600 MWe project, has also imposed a new condition that effectively puts the future of the project in the hands of the Australian government and takes the commencement date out of the company’s control,”  said Paul Welfare, the general manager of Dual Gas, in a statement announcing a freeze on the project.

The VCAT ruling stated:

“Construction of the works approved by this works approval must not commence until such time as the Australian government has entered into contracts under its ‘Contracts for Closure’ program (or through any similar program or commercial agreement) which provide for the closure by 2020 of at least 600 MWe of coal-fired electricity generation in Victoria.”

As the summary of the VCAT ruling explains, HRL made its objections known before the condition was placed:

“Although such a condition was opposed by Dual Gas, the imposition of such a condition on the works approval will more transparently demonstrate a nett [sic] reduction in overall greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in Victoria, and more clearly facilitate the transition to a lower emissions energy sector.”

But Welfare claims the decision could have wider implications. “This condition is a major concern for this project, and it is unclear what it means for the future of Victoria’s Latrobe Valley,” he said.

HRL also owns Energy Brix, which runs a power plant in the Latrobe Valley that is currently one of the five generators under negotiations with the government to close under the Contract for Closure program. The government expects to officially conclude negotiations by June 30 this year.

June 30 is the same day that the federal government funding for the HRL power plant is due to expire. It is this “considerable uncertainty” about the project that has resulted in it being placed on hold, said Welfare.

The federal government promised $100 million funding for the HRL project under the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund. However the application for that funding closed back in 2006 and HRL has had its funding deadline extended several times in recent years.

Federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson warned earlier this year that this would be the final extension for the funding. Victoria also promised $50 million in state funding, but $30 million of that is contingent on federal funding.

Dual Gas did not respond to calls for comment before deadline, but we will update if this becomes available.

Meanwhile, the NSW-government owned Macquare Generation announced that it had cut its asset values by a third yesterday — from $1.8 billion to $1.1 billion — in preparation for the implementation of the carbon price.

Macquarie Generation is the largest power generator in the country, and our biggest emitter, and expects its carbon tax bill to be around $460 million annually based on the carbon price of $23 per tonne. Last year it produced 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

“If similarly sized writeoffs are taken at the other two NSW government-owned generators, Delta Electricity and Eraring Energy, this would wipe another $1 billion off the value of government-owned assets due to the federal government’s new tax,” reports Brian Robbins in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Crikey will soon be launching a series examining how businesses and industry are responding to the implementation of the carbon tax. Stay tuned.

The searing image of furious town hall meetings and irrigators setting the first iteration of the guide on fire back in 2010 helped to inform how the MDBA approached public consultations this time around, in a bid to canvass public reaction to the draft plan released in November 2011.

There have been over 100 consultations since the draft plan was released including; 34 invitation-only round table meeting, 24 opening to the public meetings, 20-30 technical meetings working with particular groups, 18 open houses with indigenous communities, 10 bank  briefings and five water trade meetings.

There’s been no public burnings of the plan this time — although rumours abounded that the MDBA had printed the plan on non-burnable paper (not true) and “I think someone tried to mulch it in Deniliquin,” Katrina Maguire general manager of stakeholder engagement at the MDBA told Crikey, “but the mulcher broke or it bounced back out quite quickly”.

Maguire attended over 90% of the more recent round of meetings and said she’d rate the authority a “slightly modest” eight out of 10 for its efforts. ”I’d give it a ten but people might not believe me,” Maguire told Crikey.

It seems the authority learnt a lot about what not to do from the 2010 experience –  the director of groundwater at the authority, Peter Hyde, said he’d give the MDBA a rating of two for its initial attempts at consultation (Hyde didn’t work for the MDBA at the time).

Crikey attended the Melbourne meeting last week, the last of the public meetings. Four tables were set up around the room, each one focusing on a specific area including examining the Sustainable Diversion Limits, Environmental Watering Plans and socio-economics.

On each table a staff member from the Authority (and one from the federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) sat waiting to answer questions. It was all terribly civilised, despite the fact that both irrigators and greenies were sitting across from each other at the table and disagreed with each other fundamentally.

This was one of the Authority’s open house style meetings, a method first requested to the MDBA by the mayor of Mildura, John Arnold.

The set up afforded people the opportunity to ask technical questions or a fundamental question of the Authority (without having to stand up and ask it in front of hundreds of people from their community). An open house style meeting “becomes much more of a dialogue,” said Maguire.

“There were still some very wound up people but they left feeling that they could have a conversation and it was not just an opportunity to ask a statement and get back one response,” Maguire told Crikey. However she noted that some groups (specifically irrigators) preferred the town hall style meeting, partly for the media attention that they bring. A mixture of town hall and open house meetings have been held.

Some of the invitation-only round table meetings involved a meeting of farmers and irrigators in the morning, and environmentalists and NGOs in a separate meeting in the afternoon (although this depended on the size of each town and what the town council requested).

Mildura mayor Arnold attended last week’s Melbourne meeting to personally hand in his council’s submission on the draft plan. Over 5,000 submissions have already been handed in to the authority from different groups, with many more expected to arrive today.

When asked how many MDBA meetings he’d attended, Arnold replied: “I’ve been everywhere, all over the place”, adding that he was very concerned about the implications of the plan on his community. “There’s no doubt that people want a plan,” said Arnold. “But we want a plan that is going to be fair and equitable for everybody.”

Has the MDBA been receptive to his concerns? “I think the message is getting through,” he replied. “But it has to be. If you’re going to put in a plan and legislate it, surely to goodness all the detail has to be there.”

And the issue of detail has come up before. At Friday’s event I spoke to Hyde about the increase of groundwater extraction in the draft plan, a move that both the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and another group of 60 Aussie scientists have criticised vehemently in the media.

Hyde pointed me to a report by the MDBA — titled Groundwater Sustainable Diversion Limit Resource Unit Summary Report Cards — which he said explained the methodology and reasoning behind the groundwater SDLs. He dismissed the criticisms by the Wentworth Group and others as “an oversimplification” and says the MDBA uses “a completely different methodology”.

But where was this latest MDBA groundwater report to be found? It was to be uploaded online on Friday, but there were issues in which Microsoft Word release it was written in. It finally appeared over the weekend. But why upload it on the final day of consultations? “It probably does look suss,” admits Hyde, although he says it was a variety of reasons — including other priorities and lack of time — that delayed its release.

“We didn’t necessarily anticipate all the issues that were needed to be clairifed in detail,” said Maguire. She noted that the public is likely to see reports and further information released over the next six to eight months and that public consultations over the basin plan will continue forever.

Better consultation doesn’t make everyone happy though.”Personally I think the difference between the guide and now is that a lot of people would say the process of developing it and the engagement with people is far improved,” said Maguire. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they like what’s in it.”

Hansen, now one of the world’s leading experts on climate science and the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was one of seven scientists who wrote the 10-page report in Science in 1981 that examined the impact of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The New York Times ran a front-page story on it at the time, noting that “the seven atmospheric scientists predict a global warming of ‘almost unprecedented magnitude’ in the next century.”

Dutch scientists Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma recently dug up the old report and compared Hansen et al’s projections of global mean temperatures to the actual temperatures of the past three decades and found the 1981 projections to be surprisingly close.

Here’s the original graph from Science, which projects global mean temperatures until 2100. It also takes in to account the phasing out of coal at different times, since coal is a cheap and plentiful resource and the scientists were aware that use of synthetic fuels or renewable energies would take a while.

Here is Oldenborgh and Haarsma’s graph, which has overlaid Hansen et al’s graph with the data from the past 31 years.

“Given the many uncertainties at the time, notably the role of aerosols, the agreement is very good indeed,” write Oldenborgh and Haarsma at Real Climate. “They only underestimated the observed trend by about 30%, similar or better in magnitude than the CMIP5 models over the same period (although these tend to overestimate the trend, still mainly due to problems related to aerosols).”

Why was it slightly underestimated? “Assumed climate sensitivity to doubled CO2, for our primary simulation then, was 2.8C. We now suggest 3C, so it may have been slightly low,” explained Hansen. “Overall it should be quite accurate, if observed climate forcings are used.”

Hansen told Crikey that he’d made mention of the Science article in his recent TED talk — titled “Why I must speak out about climate change” and he assumes that’s why Oldenborgh and Haarsma investigated it.

Not that the 1981 report was Hansen’s first look at climate models. “I became involved in climate calculations for Earth in the middle 1970s, publishing a paper on the effect of Mount Agung on global temperature in 1978, I believe, and a paper on the effect of several trace gases in 1976, and working on a 3-D climate model, providing results to the famous Charney study in 1979,” he said.

Climate science has developed significantly since 1981, says Australian palo-climate scientist Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University. These include a clearer understand of the role of the oceans and the magnitude of their feedbacks, the role of aerosols, projecting tipping points, the connection between climate change and extreme weather events, the study of ice cores and the development of paleoclimate science.

“An awful lot has been learnt since then but the principles and projections of the system have been determined quite accurately by Hansen and his group,” Glikson told Crikey.

Hansen has been an outspoken member of the climate science community for many years, and has even been arrested several times for his involvement in environmental protests. His activist attitudes have come under attack from his own NASA colleagues in recent days. A letter released overnight, signed by 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts, criticises NASA’s public crusading on climate change. The letter was sent late last month to NASA administrator Charles Bolden. It reads in part:

“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”

But Glikson said he did not recognise any of the 49 names from the list as climate scientists and instead said most appeared to be astronauts, engineers and various technical specialists, and therefore from a scientific point of view their arguments were not based in peer review-based science.

He did note however that astronauts are powerful public figures and he expected that media outlets would pick up the story.

The final lines from Hansen et al’s 1981 research seem particularly prophetic:

“Political and economic forces affecting energy use and fuel choice make it unlikely that the CO2 issue will have a major impact on energy policies until convincing observations of the global warming are in hand. In light of historical evidence that it takes several decades to complete a major change in fuel use, this makes large climate change almost inevitable. However, the degree of warming will depend strongly on the energy growth rate and choice of fuels for the next century. Thus, CO2 effects on climate may make full exploitation of coal resources undesirable. An appropriate strategy may be to encourage energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources, while using fossil fuels as necessary during the next few decades.

“The climate change induced by anthropogenic release of CO2 is likely to be the most fascinating global geophysical experiment that man will ever conduct. The scientific task is to help determine the nature of future climatic effects as early as possible. The required efforts in global observations and climate analysis are challenging, but the benefits from improved understanding of climate will surely warrant the work invested.”

Crikey asked Hansen how he felt that despite all the “convincing observations of the global warming” from scientists in the last 30 years, there has been little impact on major global energy policies.

“We assumed that governments would act in the best interests of the public. So far they have acted in the best interests of the fossil fuel industry,” he replied. “Money talks in Washington and other capitals, and, unfortunately, the people profiting from business-as-usual have the money.”

Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has recently found that there are significant differences in how certain groups think about science and the scientific community — particularly discovering that the conservatives most likely to distrust the scientific community tend to better educated than those who do trust it. The research has been published in an article, Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010 (American Sociological Review 77(2) 167-187).

The research examines:

“differences in trust and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. The patterns for science are also unique when compared to public trust in other secular institutions. Results show enduring differences in trust in science by social class, ethnicity, gender, church attendance and region.”

Now science has always been politicised — and sometimes the scientific process itself has been politicised (i.e. Lysenko in Stalinist Russia) — but it is increasingly politicised in different ways. According to Gauchat three main hypotheses have been advanced over the years about attitudes to science. The cultural ascendancy thesis predicts a uniform increase in public trust in science across all groups. This might be called the Enlightenment view in which, from Bacon onwards, scientists have been banishing superstition and revolutionising our knowledge of the world. The alienation thesis suggests a cultural backlash against technocratic authority has affected levels of scientific trust (think here of the impact of environmentalists, counter-cultural activists and other modern day mystics). The politicisation thesis predicts ideological conservatives will experience group-specific declines in trust.

Gauchat sought to test all this by looking at the section of the US General Social Survey (GSS) which has been sampling confidence in institutions from 1972. Specifically he looked at the question relating to trust in “the Scientific Community” and respondents choices between “a great deal”, “only some”, “hardly any” or “don’t know.”

Previous research on the topic has suggested that education is associated with greater levels of trust in science. Age is non-linear with trust declining and then increasing (probably mainly due to a belief in the life-saving capacity of modern medicine). Underprivileged groups, women, non-whites, lower income families and Southerners (US version) also have lower levels of trust. However, Gauchat says, “The results (from the GSS) are quite profound because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.”

Basically, possibly mirroring Australian experience, educated and other conservatives thought science was fine in the 1970s and 80s when it was a convenient stick with which to bludgeon environmentalists and others, but became not so fine when it became a justification for government action on issues such as climate change and pollution control.

Conservative (specifically Republican) attitudes to climate change are analysed in another recent paper Republicans and Climate Change: An Audience Analysis of Predictors for Belief and Policy Preferences by various academics from George Mason, Yale and American Universities. The authors are Justin C. Rolfe-Redding, Edward M Maibach, Lauren Feldman and Anthony A. Lieserowitz and the paper is available here.

Starting from the polling data which shows that Democrats are more likely (79% vs 38%) than Republicans to believe that climate change is occurring, the authors looked at factors which influenced that situation and whether there were opportunities revealed by audience analysis and segmentation to change attitudes.  They found that there were Republicans with a robust belief in climate science although other research has also found a strong media effect — for instance, if you watch FOX News you are less likely to believe in climate change. Similar research in Australia would probably find that reading The Australian has a similar effect although, as with all media effect research, we need to keep in mind Veblen’s insight that people choose media because it reflects their views rather than changing their views because of the media they consume.

The paper looks at a host of determinants of attitudes to climate science and reviews much of the research on the subject as well. The review reveals that “many Republicans who believe in climate change remain silent because they fear their views are in a minority within their own party, further relegating the debate to vocal critics of climate change”.

Australia’s conservatives are in the reverse position of course, where most climate science denialists (among politicians at least) have to pretend that they believe and will take action even while there is a chorus of business leaders and a few clerics (Cardinal George Pell for instance) who proselytise against climate science — all supported by systematic and sophisticated global PR campaigns.

Of course, reflecting on the differences between conservatives in various countries it is interesting to look at some current differences between Republicans, Liberals, and David Cameron’s Tories. Cameron’s party is serious about climate change and supports a price on carbon, is about to legalise gay marriage and UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has just commented on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict saying: “Systematic, illegal Israeli settlement activity poses the most significant and live threat to the viability of the two-state solution. The Israeli government’s policy is illegal under international law, counter-productive, destabilising and provocative.”

Just imagine a US Republican presidential candidate, a Liberal Shadow Minister or even an ALP Foreign Minister saying the same thing. At this rate we will all have to be very precise about when we use the word Tory and about whom.

The seven-page end of year report is fairly general, but outlines that many Australian businesses are already preparing for a carbon price and many communities. It names the Illawarra region as particularly proactive in bringing together businesses, politicians and community groups in helping to combat climate change.

The aim of the Climate Comission is engage to provide independent and authoritative information for the general public on climate change issues. The Commission has held 15 public forums, 15 business and local leaders forums and launched 10 reports in its first year (the commission was established last February). A significant 92% of feedback from attendees said they found community forums good or very good.

A wide cross section of Australians have been attending the Climate Commission forums — which have been held at 11 regional centres — with the report noting: “We have heard from thousands of Australians, including steel workers, reef tour operators, sugar mill owners, car factory workers, local councillors, state government officials, business and industry leaders, school students and teachers, doctors, and farmers.”

“After travelling around Australia, it quickly became clear that the political and media debate is not the whole picture. For the most part, we found that people want more than talk and they’re ready for action,” said  Chief Commissioner Tim Flannery.

“Many businesses have already planned for a carbon price and we’ve been impressed by the number of companies that are embracing clean energy solutions that make sense for their bottom line and the climate. We’ve also heard concerns in the business community about regulatory uncertainty.”

The Climate Commission is made up of its chief Tim Flannery, Roger Beale, Dr Susannah Eliott, Gerry Hueston, Professor Lesley Hughes and Professor Will Steffen.

Part of the Climate Commission’s terms of reference state: “The Commission will not comment on policy matters nor provide policy advice or recommendations.”

And you can see the Commisson battle to keep the policy out of the science matters — obviously difficult when one of its aims is to help explain carbon pricing — in its end of year report:

“There is considerable confusion in the community about the Australian government’s carbon price and the progressive move to emissions trading, and also about the Opposition’s plans for direct action on climate change. Many businesses indicated that regulatory certainty is particularly important to their decisions on investing in the future.

Although the Commission does not advocate any particular policy position, it has sought to explain how carbon pricing encourages reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and drives investment in cleaner energy and energy efficiency.”

The end of year review comes as a Galaxy poll of 1051 people, paid for by the Institute of Public Affairs, recently found that 31% of respondents saw Flannery as reliable. In contrast, 24% found him unreliable. The majority — 45% — were uncommitted.

The Commission says it hopes to focus on social media in the coming months (you can find it on Twitter at @ClimateComm) as part of furthering its community engagement.